Tuesday, October 16, 2007

1975 - Dr Who: The Frail Tardis!

November 22, 1975, and Dr Who celebrated its 12th birthday, still going strong with Tom Baker at the helm. But if the show was in fine fettle for its age, the Tardis was not. Said producer Phillip Hinchcliffe: "The Tardis is supposed to disguise itself as some everyday object. This one disguised itself as a police box - and stuck like that. But blue police boxes are being got rid of. So I'm worried that some younger viewers will not know what it is supposed to be...

"Also, Tardis is getting very frail now. Whenever we take it to a new location, it falls to pieces. So we are having to decide whether to make a new one the same shape, or maybe find some reason for changing it."

Design a new Tardis! Could you invent a new time-travel machine to take over from the poor, battered old Tardis? asked the Sun in its Dr Who competition for 14s and under. Top prize was a "date with Dr Who at the BBC television studios in London" and a Dr Who board game from Denys Fisher Toys. 20 runners up were awarded board games.

The Dr Who production team, of course, decided to stick with tradition and the Tardis retained its familiar police box guise.

INTRODUCTION

This is one of a series of three blogs - the other two cover the 1960s (Spacehopper), and the 1980s ('80s Actual).

After all the '70s hype of the last ten years or so, this is a chance to relive the decade as it really was in England, through newspaper and magazine clippings and memories.

This is the REAL 1970s, not the BBC or Wikipedia's versions, which hype the decade to death and bolster it up with 1960s and 1980s pop culture.

The '70s were often grim, far slower moving than today, and saw the '60s hippie spell rapidly fading to be replaced by economic gloom and a glut of anger - which manifested itself in the Punk era.

It's the decade where we liked the Wombles, chucked frisbees, watched Upstairs, Downstairs and Starsky & Hutch, and witnessed the gloriously tacky but hugely danceable rise of a type of music called "Disco" - a new soundtrack for the discotheques, which had been established before the decade began. With its rich influences, including Soul and Pop, Disco was a wow. Though not with everybody.

Very few people had a video recorder (only 5% of UK households had one by 1980), there were no mobile phones, and although colour TV had been around in this country since 1967, they didn't come cheap and many of us poorer folk stuck to black and white.

Tristram of George & Mildred got "Pong" at Christmas 1979, but nobody I knew had a TV games system, which became available, at a price, late in the decade.

Many of us were dirt poor, inflation rocketed, in 1979 interest rates soared to 17% - the highest since records began in 1694, decimalisation (the coins were designed in the late '60s ready for "D" day in 1971) was controversial - was it bumping up prices? - and the Queen's Silver Jubilee Day saw the Sex Pistols in the pop charts with a song which certainly did not express loyal greetings...

Come back to the REAL 1970s, no rosy coloured specs, no rewriting of the decade to include pop culture belonging to the '60s or '80s, but as clear a view as I can possibly give of the decade!

This blog is largely based on English magazine and newspaper clippings and my memories, but I hope that it will also be useful and enjoyable to those living in the other UK nations - and much further afield.